It has been a great second week here in Celje and it is absolutely gorgeous!! Slovenia is an amazing place and it is so cool!! Here in Celje it turns out that it is built on an ancient Roman city and there are roman ruins everywhere! It is also really cool/hilarious, because they are doing construction on the cobble stones (which are everywhere!) and they keep find roman stuff! The Slovenes sometime get really sick of this, because it then puts back the construction for weeks, haha! A couple of months ago they found an ancient Roman Well and restored it and I got the chance to go see it this morning! :)
This week has been very busy, because we have had Visa Paper work to do, Zone Conference, a big Open House for the Church, and Conference! So I have been very busy!
Here in Celje we have about 70 members on recored, but only about 15-20 are active and these past few weeks we have been doing a lot of reactivation work. We have been meeting with a woman named Kestancija and she is awesome! She has been inactive for a couple of months, but we are trying hard to get her back. She is very sweet and very nice and is about 50 years old and she came with us to Conference yesterday! (conference was yesterday, because we had to wait a week for the Slovene translations and for the first year the Slovenes actually did their only translations for conference instead of having a returned missionary in Salt Lake do it. It is actually a lot better for the members here and it was a blessing for them.) Kestancija loved general conference and I think that she will start coming back to Church, which will be a great blessing for the branch.
The Branch President here is President Stojanovič and he is amazing! I love him and he has such a great spirit and is very kind! Me and Elder Benson actual gave him a blessing last night, and I had to do the Anointing in Slovene. Kind of hard, but I did it with the help of the White Handbook! Wahoo!! ;)
I absolutely loved this last conference and I have never been so excited for one ever before! We watched the saturday sessions at a Senior Couple's home (Elder and Sister Ewell) and we sat in their living room eating snacks while watching it on a laptop. It really made me miss my family and remembering the good times of sitting with them in my pajamas (which I couldn't do, haha) and thinking that only a year ago was I sitting with all of them, when the age change was made! It made me miss them so much! So I want you all to know that I love you and am always thinking about you!
Yesterday we watched the Sunday sessions in Ljubljana in the church there and it was awesome!¨ The first session I watched in Slovene, which was so hard! I literally only understood about 5% of what was being said, but it was really good practice. I then watched the second session in English with some of the slovenes that were in the MTC with me, but were a group that was about 3 weeks ahead of me. It was great to hang out with them again and it was really cool, because on of them brought an investigator to conference and as we were watching he started to ask a lot of questions about the Plan of Salvation and I was able to help Elder Dearinger and Elder Stot (the MTC missionaries) teach, it was great experience and we all felt the spirit a lot.
I will mention a little about my daily life here in Celje! So me and Elder Benson live in an apartment that is the very last room in the entire building, 6th floor actually. And every morning I walk down those steps and every night when I am exhausted I walk up those steps. Our apartment is very small and has about 3 rooms: kitchen, bathroom, bedroom. Very basic, but it's home! Then me and Elder Benson have bikes and we are actually one of the few missionaries with bikes. Elder Benson and his last companion bought them at Police auction last transfer. They are so nice, but... my bike is probably the most awful bike in the world, haha! It literally sounds like it has an engine on it when you are peddling and it is so slow and old. But I am grateful for it, because I am definitely getting a workout from it everyday, haha! :)
I have to get going now, but I hope this was a good update letter! There is so much to do and so much to write about, so it is really hard to get everything done! I hope you all are doing well and I miss and love all of you!!
-Elder Lyman
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